S. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

Ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. — 2 Corinthians 4:5. The Church of Christ has been a power in the world for many years. More and more widely it has spread, till civilization is familiar with its presence; and over the borders of civilization it has run with its missionary influence, and in lands which once were civilized it has lingered with its persistent vitality, so that today it is hard to find any country which is the home of man wherein the Christian Church has not laid the corner-stones of its truth and lifted the spire of its hope.

It is possible at least to ascribe to the intrinsic vitality of the Church some of those features of her history which oftentimes seem strange. That she should have excited violent hatred as well as violent love; that she should have been variously conceived, and that men should have quarreled over their various conceptions of her; that she should have actually been different things at different times, — all these indisputable facts are what might naturally have been looked for in a living system made of living men. They all have come. They fill the Church’s history with life and movement. They bring her ever new, though ever old and still the same, to each new age. They make the question, What then is the Church? A question always fit to ask and answer.

I shall not try to ask or answer it to-day. But on this morning when we are to ask you for your offerings for the extension of the Church’s work and life in our own country, — for domestic missions, — I should like, as it has been my custom, to draw your thoughts to one or two truths about the Church and its people and its ministry which are very simple, but which I am not certain that we always carry in our memories.

We go back to the New Testament for the beginnings of the Church; and, when we once are there, — quite on the other side of all the discussions and refinements which have come in through all the Christian ages, — it is wonderful how simple it all is. Jesus Christ comes and preaches the Gospel of the Kingdom, and manifests the life of God. He stands with His shining nature upon the hill of the truth He has to preach. He is lifted up, by and by, in the fullness of His self-sacrifice upon His cross. Toward His light, soul after soul is drawn out of the darkness. Into the power of His self-sacrifice one life after another is summoned out of its discontent. It is all personal and individual at first. "As many as receive Him to them gives He power to become the Sons of God." It is this man and that man that is summoned. The light shines through this window and finds one laborer at his work. It smiles in through the smoke of some boisterous revel and fills some generous heart with shame. It smiles upon some dreamer and turns his dream into a purpose. It is all personal and individual. "Follow me," "Follow me," and Matthew leaves his tax-table standing in the street; and the sons of Zebedee pull hastily in over the blue water to give themselves to the Master, who has called them from the shore. And what came next? Why, the most natural thing in all the world, — that which must always come when single men believe the same truth, or are driven on by the same impulse. When did a host of scholars ever sit at the same teacher’s feet and not become a school? When did a host of separate soldiers go each to fight the same enemy and not be drawn into an army? When were a multitude of atoms ever filled with one magnetism and not brought into magnetic communion with each other? All the individual believers in, and followers of, Christ become one in their common loyalty and love. And so out of the crowd of disciples comes the Church. By and by a change approaches. The fountain out of which the Church life visibly has sprung, the Master who has called each of these disciples audibly to Himself, is just about to vanish from their sight. He is to be still to each of them, and to each of those who shall come after them, the same which He has always been. Still, with His unseen presence. He is to give His separate summons to every soul. The unity of His believers to the end of time is still to have the secret of its existence in the personal relation between each of them and Him. To help this invisible relation to realize itself and not to be all lost in the unseen, the gracious kindness of the Master provides two symbols which thenceforth become the pledges at once of the personal believer’s belonging to the Lord, and of the belonging of believers to each other. The sacraments are set like gems to hold the Church into its precious unity.

Such is the Church. The union of believers, outwardly manifested by the sacraments, but having its essence in the personal union of each believer’s soul with Christ. I see the gates of the New Testament open outward. That life which had been taking shape within the little world which the New Testament enclosed, goes forth so quietly, so simply to meet the larger life of the world! It is Peter coming down from the house-top to go to Cornelius at Caesarea. It is Paul crossing over from Troas into Macedonia. I see the history which has come since. And all bears testimony to the naturalness of the New Testament process by the way in which it has possessed the world. This Jesus must be a true Lord of men. This power which draws His disciples to each other must be a genuine power. These sacraments must be intrinsically natural utterances of what they try to express; for, lo, everywhere the Church has built itself! In every age, in every land she stands, her single life pulsating with the multitudinous life of which she is composed, the ultimate pulsation coming from the living life of her Master, to which every particle of her being immediately responds; the two jewels on her breast-plate burning with ever-deepening and accumulating richness, and making together the clasp which holds about her essential nature the robe of her outward form. This is the Christian Church, — the most glorious because the most natural, the most natural because the most glorious, of all the associations and institutions of mankind. But as yet, you see, we have not spoken of that which sometimes seems to stand forth first in people’s thinking of the Church. We have not spoken of the ministry, and we are right. The Church exists before the ministry. Jesus has gathered His disciples. They are united each to Him, and through Him they are all united to each other; and then, one day, out of the group of those disciples He chooses twelve whom also He calls apostles. They are disciples first, and their discipleship lies behind their apostleship until the end. Out from the body of the Church rise certain men, called by the Lord to whom the Church belongs, in whom all that the Church means shall be peculiarly represented, who shall tell its story to the world, who shall both cultivate and manifest its life. They are to build the Church, and to declare the Church. They are not to rule the Church, certainly not to be the Church. That is what has taken place ever since. Out of the great body of Christians have stood forth the Christian leaders. Now with one sort of ordination, now with another; now with the summons of the people, now with the irresistible impulse of their own souls; now with the direct call of God most clear and plain, but always, if they were truly ministers of Christ, with all three consenting and confederate to give them their position, — in every age, in every land there have stood forth the Church’s ministers (true successors of the first apostles), some more and some less visibly united to those earliest ministers by their forms of faith and action; but all successors of the apostles in the nature and the spirit of the work they had to do. And that ministry, what was it, what is it, to the Church? Is it the Church’s master? Is it the sole and solemn channel through which divine truth and the divine will comes to the waiting hearts which could know neither but for it? Is it the stream through which alone grace flows out of the Fountain of Grace, which is the heart of God? That were a clear idea, a most distinct and unmistakable theory. That would set the people following wherever the ministry chose to lead. That would reduce all duty to one single duty, obedience, perfect obedience to the spiritual lord. But also that would either deny or render insignificant the very fact from which, as we saw, the Church took its existence. That fact is the personal communion between each believer and the Christ. That fact must not be tampered with. No ministry of any most thoroughly ordained apostle must relieve the individual soul of its responsibility or rob the individual soul of its privilege of immediate search after the truth, immediate submission to the commandment of its Lord. What then? There is only one other place for the ministry to hold. If it is not the master it must be the servant of the Church. If it is not set to rule, it must rejoice to obey; to know the Church to be greater than it and not its creature, to accept it as its highest duty to help the Church to realize itself, and to grow into the full power of the Divine Life of which it, through the relation between Christ and the souls of its individual members, is perpetually the recipient.

Ruler or servant, which shall it he? Strange how from the first the very name by which the successors of the apostles have been called has seemed to answer the question for itself. They have been ministers; and "ministers" means "servants." Strange how the greatest of them all at the beginning took pains to claim the place in which he and his brethren should stand. "Not for that we have dominion over your faith," cried Paul, "but we are partakers of your joy." And then again in those great words which I have made my text, — "We preach ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake." Strange that, with words like these written in the very forefront of its shining history, the Church should have so loved the other notion of the rulership of the clergy, the dominion of the priest; and hierarchies, splendid with pomp, or subtle with intrigue, but always hard with tyranny, should have so filled the story of the Christian ages. And yet not strange! Nothing is strange whose illustrations occur alike in every region of human life. And where is the department of living in which servantship has not always tried to turn itself into rulership, and had with long delay and difficulty to be brought back to the higher idea of servantship again. Certainly it is so in government. What is the world learning after all these years except that the governor is the servant of his people? After centuries of tyranny and subjectship, — centuries in which the people seemed to exist only by the ruler’s permission, and to have no power of originating thought and action, — everything is changed. In all of civilized Christendom there is no king who dares to claim that he is anything but the people’s servant, that his power came from them, and that their will must lie behind his everywhere. That idea of servantship has never been so absolutely lost in religion as it has in politics; but if you read the story of five centuries ago, or if you see the visions which floating before the eyes of priests have been incorporated into ecclesiastical institutions, you will become aware of how the other idea, — the idea of lordship, — has always been pressing for assertion. Lord-Bishops and Lord-Presbyters, Church Barons and Church Princes, Popes, Prelates, Potentates, — they all bear witness to the presence of a theory that the Church exists first in the clergy, and that the laity become part of the Church only by the extension of the clergy’s life to them. Against that theory stands up the other: that the laity are the Church, and that the clergy exist separate from them only to carry out the purposes of their life, to do in special and peculiar ways what it is the duty and privilege of the whole Church to do, — in one great word to be the Church’s servants, not its lords.

There is indeed one word in our own church’s use which seems at first to give a color to the other theory. The minister of any parish is called its "rector" or its "ruler." And no doubt much of the direction of the parish’s affairs is given to his hands. What is his power? I take it to be very much like that which the company of any ship intrusts to one among their number whom they make their steersman. They set him at the helm; they put the rudder in his hands; they bid him watch the compass and the stars, — but it is all a delegation of their power. He has no right to sail the ship to any other than the port they wish to reach. They really steer the ship in him. He is their servant still, obeying the commandment which they gave him when they said, "Guide us and help us find our way." But then the question comes whether with such an idea of the ministry as this, it is possible to think of it and speak of it as a divine institution, — as something instituted and ordained by God Himself. Why not? It all depends on where we let ourselves get into the habit of looking for the work of God and discovering the operations of His hands. If we can see God only in movements quite outside of the natural proceedings of humanity, then we shall hardly think of any ministry as being divinely ordered, unless it come down to us in a chariot out of the sky, or else a hand be reached forth from heaven to rest upon the head of the selected priest. But if we thoroughly believe that God’s activity is never more potent than when His children, full of the love and fear of Him, give Him the opportunity to work through them, then surely there can be no ordination more complete or solemn than that which draws forth from the host of worshipping and working Christians here one and there another to be in special ways that which they all are in the essence of their Christianity; to be, as Saint Paul says, "helpers of their joy." Do you or I believe that the President of the United States is less divinely called to his high place than Henry the Eighth or Charles the First was set upon the throne of England. And yet the president is the people’s servant, and the kings were tyrants. When from the depths of any nation’s life there stirs a consciousness of need which finally by a deliberate choice calls forth one man and says to him, "Be our guide," and he obeys, I know not where to find a more true utterance of God’s will than that. The very methods of the early Christian life sound crude to-day. We read the story of how they chose Matthias by lot to fill the place of Judas. We hear their prayer to God that He will guide the drawing of the numbered disk. We watch them as they stand around with serious exalted faces waiting the result. It is all true, inspiring, and impressive; but what is it compared with the movement of God’s spirit through a church, bidding it summon this or that earnest soul to help it and to show it of His love. A group of Christian hearts is a nobler and more sensitive medium for God to speak through than a handful of pebbles in an urn. God may speak through either; surely the Voice through the sacred, the divine medium of Man will be the more sacred, the more divine.

There are three possible calls to every minister, — the call of God, the call of his own nature, and the call of needy men. May not one almost say that no man has a right to think himself a minister who does not hear all three vocations blending into one and marking out his path to walk in past all doubt. And these three come to perfect union in the soul of him who hears the Father call one of His children to serve the rest in those great necessities which belong to them all. And if we ask not simply about the sacredness of the ordination, but about the inspiration that goes with it. The answer is no less clear. Which will inspire a man most, which will carry him most buoyantly through a long life of labor, making the last years more eager and exhilarating than the first, the joy of ruling men or the joy of serving men? He little knows what human nature is who hesitates about his answer. You may indeed feel the identity between the two. You may see how each, realized at its fullest, becomes the other; how he who rules men most wisely, serves them most humbly; and he who serves men most efficiently, rules them most powerfully; but taking them in their ordinary distinction from each other, it is a nobler relation to a man to serve him than it is to rule him. Rulership stifles and hardens the nature which it deals with. Servantship opens and softens it. Rulership is unsympathetic. Servantship is full of sympathy. Rulership is monotonous and works by law. Servantship is ingenious and various and free. Rulership is self-conscious. Servantship is self -forgetful. The ruler grows tired on his throne. The servant sees his working room always alive with desire and need.

One sees the young men pressing in at the gates of life, eagerly asking what there is to do in this great, busy world, and he longs to hold out to them the privilege of the Christian ministry. I see the young men of this congregation; I have seen them for almost twenty years. I have watched some of them as they have taken their places as ministers, and are doing the Gospel work. I have seen the great host of them going other ways. I see the great host of them goring other ways to-day. They turn to honest, useful, interesting work on every side. I rejoice in all that they are doing and will do, but all the time I ask myself, "Why is it that they do not more largely seek the ministry of Christ?" I would that I could put the privilege of that ministry before them as it seems to us who have long lived in it. I wish that someone here this morning might so see it that it might win his life. I believe so fully that the Christian ministry in the next fifty years is to have a nobler opportunity of usefulness and power than it has ever had in the past, that I would gladly call, if I could, with the voice of a trumpet to the brave, earnest, cultivated young men who are to live in the next fifty years to enter into it, and share the privilege of that work together. And the word with which I would summon them should be that great word "service." "Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant," Jesus said. It was an announcement, not of mortification, but of satisfaction. It was not saying, "You must disappoint your desire," but "You must fulfill it." The fulfillment of life is service. And then He stretched out His arms, and with that self-assertion which no other son of man has ever dared to make. He bade them see the illustration of what He had just told them in Himself. "Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister," He said. The man who ministers, the man who is a minister, - that is, a servant, — enters into the company of Jesus. He lives with Him who gave His life for men, and in so doing, lived supremely. He undertakes the sympathetic study of humanity in every part. He clothes his life with honor for human nature. He believes in man as clogged, hindered, and broken, but as capable of purification and rectification by the power of God which he may help to bring into exercise upon it; and so he undertakes his service. Is there any theory of rulership which can compare with that for the exhilaration and elevation of a devoted man? But the ministry does not exist for the good of the ministers, but for the good of the people; and so it is necessary — before we are sure that any conception of the ministry is thoroughly good and true — that we should see if that theory will help the people to their best life. What then will be the effect upon the people of being taught that their ministers are indeed their ministers, their servants? There is one effect which it might produce which would indeed be a blessing. It might make the people feel and accept their true responsibility. If they are indeed the Church, charged with its interests, with its progress dependent upon them, they must be full of thought and care and study. They must know how their charge is faring. Their eyes must be here at home and at the ends of the earth at the same time. They are the Church, and its disgrace or honor, its success or failure, is theirs.

There have been great times, some far back in the early history, some in the modern days, in which the whole body of the Church has seemed in large degree ready to claim its privilege. The problems of religion have seemed to be all men’s problems. The worship of the House of God has seemed to be all men’s care. The extension of the truth, the spread of missions, has enlisted all men’s anxiety and ingenuity. At those times the ministers have seemed really to be what they ought to be, not strange, foreign beings dropped down from the skies, or blown into a region with which they had no affinity out of some wholly alien world. They have been part and parcel of the life from which they sprang, and which always lay behind them and fed them with its strength. They were the leaders of the people only as the first curling wave which runs up farthest on the beach is the leader of the great world of waves which stretches out behind it, all crowding forward, all uttering its shoreward impulse in the servant wave which bears its banner, and tells of its desire. The Church — our church like all the rest — falls too far short of this idea. It is too much a clergyman’s church. The people sit too much and say, "Tell us what we shall think," instead of turning their own thoughts to the most sacred things, and by and by being able to say, "We think this; help us, servants and friends of ours, to see if it be true. " The people sit too much and say, "Tell us what to do," instead of coming with their hands full of plans, saying, "This needs to be done. Do it, servants and friends of ours, and we will supply you with all the means and help you need. It is our work. " Do you not feel, even as I speak, what a breadth and freshness and freedom and variety and vitality would come into the Church’s thought and working if the Church itself — which is the people, not the clergy — really did think and work, and with a true sense of responsibility and a true initiative impulse accepted the privilege of their commission?

Sometimes we hear our American system of Church management abused and even ridiculed. And no doubt it is liable to manifest theoretical objections. It is capable of being made to seem very absurd that a congregation should ask a man to come and be their teacher, but insist that they will only ask him with the understanding that he believes what they believe, and that if he comes to believe otherwise than they do, he will go away and teach them no longer. Such theoretical objections are easy to draw up in telling shape, but they amount to very little. They are of no consequence whatever compared with that, the real fact of value about our system, — which is, that the people are, at least declaredly, the living and effective body of the Church. The power and the responsibility reside in them. They have the real apostolical succession. Only this certainly is true, — that, with a system at whose heart is such a truth, we are bound to carry that truth out into activity with vastly more completeness than we do now. It will not do for the people to hold the power and try to give the responsibility away. Power and responsibility must go together. If the Church, as it ought, counts the ministers its servants, it must assume the deeper and higher and more exigent prerogatives of mastery, and think and study and believe and act with the energy and earnestness of a true Church of God.

There is good reason to believe that the people in all the churches — and in our church as well as all the others — show signs to-day that they will recognize and claim their place. There is more general thought about religious truth. There is more spontaneous activity in Christian work. Men come into the Church’s communion less and less from mere drift and habit, more and more with serious question about what it means. If the clergyman is less reverenced as an autocrat and less consulted as an oracle, he is more used as a willing servant, and more valued as a faithful friend. For you will freely understand how, in all that I have said this morning, the word "servant" must be completely stripped of a great deal of base association before it can be put to the high use which I have claimed for it. It must be not contradictory to, but identical with, the other word which I have just linked to it, the word "friend." "Servus Servorum Dei," — the servant of the servants of God, — so the most gorgeous of ecclesiastical princes has called himself, reverting ever to the first and truest thought of what he is. And yet "Amicus Amicorum Dei," — friend of the friends of God, — surely that too must be his name. All hardness, all reluctance, all tyranny on the one side, and all obsequiency on the other side, must pass away. And then in an atmosphere of mutual service — which is also an atmosphere of mutual love — the lives of minister and people must give themselves each to the other, and both to the work of Christ and of His Church. The Church of the Millennial days shall be nothing less, nothing else than a regenerated and complete humanity. There all shall be ministers, for all shall be servants. All shall be people, for all shall be served. In these imperfect days let us watch and wait for those days of perfectness. Let us do all we can to help their coming. Let us count no condition final till they come. Let us live in, and live for, and never despair of, the ever-advancing, ever-enlarging Church of Christ.